And the award for most hypocritical performance by an Australian newspaper goes to...

The Australian, with Dennis Shanahan in his column this morning, opining that the public is tired of politicians trying to smear each other.   Yes, that would be the same paper that was running for months Hedley Thomas' protracted game of "but what about this bit of paper?", attempting to smear the PM over a minor bit of legal work and her poor choice of boyfriend 20 years ago.

Now, of course, when a Coalition candidate gets a shellacking from a judge for legal games that went on a mere 10 months ago, it's time to move on, isn't it Dennis?   The obviously shifty game of denying knowledge that went on amongst Canberra Liberals 9 months ago is of no interest whatsoever, hey.

Oh, and of course the political hypocrisy continues as far as the prospect of investigations are concerned.

Tony Abbott (additional words by me]:

"There are all sorts of rumours that have been running around about Mr Slipper for years," Mr Abbott said.  [And I have supported him wholeheartedly throughout this.] ... "I think any such inquiry would plainly be a bit of a witch-hunt" [whereas my promise to hold an inquiry as to the PM's choice of boyfriend 18 years ago and legal matters for which no criminal prosecution has ever been instituted despite investigation at the time would be a matter of crucial public interest and not motivated by political self interest at all.]

A hard life

Abraham Lincoln, bare-knuckle brawler? - Salon.com

Well, this interview with an author of (yet another) book about Lincoln contains a lot of stuff that I didn't know.  He had a hard life:

The thing I hope readers take away from my book is this: Lincoln truly suffered in life.  He had horrible bouts of depression. He was on suicide watch several times. He was sometimes completely bed-ridden. He said he was haunted by the thought of rain falling on graves all of his life. His mother died when he was nine; his sister died when he was sixteen. The first woman he ever loved died within a few months of him meeting her. He had one son die before the boy was four years old. He lost another son named Willie not too long after they got to the White House.  And given Lincoln’s depressive nature, all of that almost pushed him over the edge. He suffered with the massive themes of his administration: slavery, spies, and ordering troops into battle. But I think, like Churchill, it was his private suffering that prepared him to help a nation that was suffering. William Herndon, Lincoln’s first biographer, said that he, “dripped melancholy as he walked.” I think his suffering drove him to faith and deepened his faith once he got to it. But he also had an atheist phase earlier in life.

 OK, some of that I knew, but a fair bit is new to me.  As is this:

  His family were what used to be called “hard-shelled” Baptists, and they were caught up in the second great awakening, which swept the frontier and was really, quite frankly, violent. It was barking and being “slain the in Spirit.” People would run around and climb trees and it was all too emotional, all too sweaty for Lincoln. His father was the kind of man that would get all weepy at dinner over something that was happening in the revival, and then beat his son the next day to make him work. Lincoln had a hard childhood but he’s the archetype of a person who rises largely through self-education. He probably didn’t have a year of school in his entire life. He read voraciously. All the stories about walking miles to borrow books are absolutely true. He began to read religious skeptics: Thomas Paine, Edward Gibbons —those men challenged Christianity. A lot of the American heroes of the Revolution were that way, Ethan Allen and others. Lincoln bought into it and went through quite a long “village atheist” phase. He schooled himself on how to attack the myths of Scripture and would carry around a Bible just to undercut it. He called Christ a bastard; it was very heated. This is one of the keys to understanding Lincoln’s life: Lincoln’s mother was illegitimate. Her grandmother had been raped by a Virginia aristocrat and Lincoln concluded that God had rejected him, given him the mark of Cain because his mom was “a bastard.” He would even call her that. So, strange as it is to us, Lincoln thought he was cursed. And he began to conclude that all of the sufferings he’d endured were because God had cursed him. So his atheism, his friends said, really was not that he didn’t believe in God, it was that he was angry at God.

Feeling for others

Understanding How Children Develop Empathy - NYTimes.com

A somewhat interesting column here on the human sense of empathy.  

It seems that this is something that must be worked out so we can program it into AI - have a look at Bryan Appleyard's recent piece on whether AI will be the death (or enslavement) of us. 

(It did occur to me, though, in reading the Appleyard piece, that given the amount of trouble viruses and bacteria can cause us, I don't know that we should have too much concern about AI's being able to wipe humanity out of contention.)

Currency woes

Dollar dazzler: why they want our money

Michael Janda seems to be saying that the high Australian dollar is a problem, but there's nought to be done about it now.

Alan Kohler blames our economic blues on another thing as well:

....Australians have had it up to here for three long years - nothing but mad, hysterical politics, day in, day out. And a strong currency.

So what we are seeing in Australia is the effect of a very unusual double whammy: political instability coupled with a strong currency.

Usually the first leads to the opposite of the second, but unfortunately the credit ratings agencies don't watch Question Time in Federal Parliament: if they did they would have cut Australia's credit rating several notches below AAA long ago.

But one of the worst things about the current popular mis-perception of the Australian economy was in the media again recently - the idea that Australia's budget deficit would not have happened under a Coalition government.

This is absolutely outrageously wrong - and Christopher Pyne's dishonest (but probably successful) attempt to further lodge this meme in the brain of the public just illustrates further why I cannot see myself voting for the Coalition next election.

Update:   it occurs to me that, if the sudden deterioration in polling for Federal Labor in Newspoll is correct, and is maintained next year, the electorate is going to be acting in pretty much the same way as it did in the run up to the 2007 election win of Kevin Rudd.   That is, it will not be under the influence of much in the way of credible policy alternatives, or acting against a government that the great majority of economists have a problem with:  it will simply be voting because of the "vibe".

Update 2:  as I understand it, this news this morning only makes worse for our over valued currency problem:

Fed makes new rate pledge, pumps cash into US economy

Life in London

iPad mini, Kindle Fire HD, or Google Nexus 7? What's in your stocking? | Money | The Observer

So, I'm not too interested in the article itself, comparing a few (but only a few) different options for people buying a tablet device for Christmas.

But what did catch my eye was that in the comments section, a few people noted that the photo in the article (showing a woman reading an iPad on a bus) was definitely something you should not do in London if you don't want to be an ex-iPad user.

That surprised me a bit.

I still want to write about how I've found using an Android vs an old iPad, as I know the world is just waiting for my erudite comments...

Reason to go to Sydney?

Wallace and Gromit get a hand at home

A Wallace and Gromit exhibition is at the Powerhouse museum.    Sadly, though, the article says no W & G film is currently in production.  

Wouldn't have guessed that

Caffeinated coffee may reduce the risk of oral cancers

High or Low?

Studies differ on climate change and warming severity, researchers trade jabs - Capital Weather Gang - The Washington Post

There's a really good post here summing up the contradictory conclusions of two recent papers - one saying climate sensitivity is likely to be at the higher end of the range (Trenberth), and one saying it should be on the lower side (Schlesinger).

Each criticises the other's approach quite strongly.  

But even Schlesinger is pragmatic and thinks the world still needs to be cautious:

Despite Schlesinger’s more optimistic outlook, he stresses sharp emissions reductions must begin, in case his estimates are wrong.

“...for argument’s sake, let’s suppose the [climate sensitivity] is larger than the values we determined....humanity must act sooner and more rapidly...” Schlesinger said.

Indeed.

A useful figure to know

BBC - Future - Health - Sex: What are the chances?

I missed this article from earlier in the year, but I reckon it has a good figure that is handy to know for anyone who needs to talk to teenagers about consequences:

 The bottom line is that a single act of intercourse between a young couple has on average a one in 20 chance of pregnancy – this assumes the opportunity presented itself on a random day, as these things tend do when you are young.

 However, the article then goes on to talk about the effectiveness of various forms of contraception, but only seems to quote figures if they are used correctly.   This seems a bit of an oversight.

Stupid right wing moochers

If there's a right wing thing I can't stand, it's when they use the Randian term "moochers", even if half in jest.   Anyone who has been a fan of Rand is automatically suspect, in my books; but to use her terminology just shows the continuing influence of a crank and a sympathy to her appalling lack of a social conscience.

But the funniest thing is when right wing starts "mooching" themselves.   Climate change fake skeptics are pretty expert at this.  Who can forget the request for money from the American family who ran into environmental problems with their feed lot in WA.    They blamed their alleged prominence in the climate change skeptic movement for their problems (never with any real evidence, as far as I could see.)   Promoted via Jonova and Watts Up With That, there appeared to be a lot of money pledged for their "save the farm" action, which may or may not be continuing, as they decamped back to the US anyway.

Now look at the latest example - Mark Steyn, who has stupidly decided to go out of his way to insult and defame Michael Mann on the pages of National Review Online, got full NRO support, which now publishes this ad:

Oh diddums?  More from their webpage:

As many of you know, National Review is not a non-profit — we are just not profitable. A lawsuit is not something we can fund with money we don’t have. Of course, we’ll do whatever we have to do to find ourselves victorious in court and Professor Mann thoroughly defeated, as he so richly deserves to be. Meanwhile, we have to hire attorneys, which ain’t cheap.

Righto.  So a publication that is making no profit decided to escalate a fight by challenging him to sue after they called him "the man behind the fraudulent climate-change “hockey-stick” graph, the very ringmaster of the tree-ring circus" and approved this quote:

Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except that instead of molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet.

What idiots.

Steyn and (much of) the Right in the US have become an intellectual embarrassment. 

And yes, it's affecting the Right as constituted in Australia:

South Australian senator Cory Bernardi, formerly Mr Abbott's parliamentary secretary, said: ''I do not think human activity causes climate change and I haven't seen anything that changes my view. I remain very sceptical about the alarmists' claims.''

Queensland senator Barnaby Joyce said the whole debate about whether humans were causing the climate to change was ''indulgent and irrelevant''.

The Coalition has a large fracture line within its ranks on this issue, and it has serious consequences on leadership and policy more broadly, since dismantling the Labor carbon "tax" and replacing it with the half baked Abbott scheme (which no economist supports as a better scheme for its intended purpose) will have  serious knock on budgetary consequences.   

It's the issue that poisons everything on the Right.  

Eurine-eka

Brain cells made from urine 

It's about using kidney cells excreted in urine and reprogramming them to be (something like) embryonic stem cells.

Hobbit hobbled

Time for celebration for those of us in the very, very small club of  "Go Away, Tolkien" (an incorporated association):  The Hobbit has only* got 74% on Rottentomatoes, and quite a few of the more prominent critics have been giving it a pretty good thrashing for being way, way too long and mostly dull.

But the most interesting thing is the poor reaction to the high frame rate version.  This, from Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian, is pretty typical:

The second unexpected point is the look of the thing. Jackson has pioneeringly shot The Hobbit in HFR, or High Frame Rate: 48 frames a second, as opposed to the traditional 24, giving a much higher definition and smoother "movement" effect. But it looks uncomfortably like telly, albeit telly shot with impossibly high production values and in immersive 3D. Before you grow accustomed to this, it feels as if there has been a terrible mistake in the projection room and they are showing us the video location report from the DVD "making of" featurette, rather than the actual film.

Some other critics have noted that it makes it way easier to spot the changes from special effects shots to reality, and that it makes fast motion look wrong (speeded up, I think they say.)

Isn't this fascinating?  I'm pretty sure I read about high frame rate film back in about the 1980's, maybe in something like Omni magazine, or perhaps Discover.   It was thought to be the way of the future.

But, it turns out, too much clarity look bad. 

I wonder why that is.  I could go for the philosophical explanation:  maybe we prefer soft edges over reality, just as people don't like to think too much of the materialist/existentialist view of the world that says it is ultimately meaningless after the suffering and temporary bursts of happiness of life. (I am full of Christmas cheer, hey?)   Of course, the religious and (in particular) Christian come back is that ultimate reality is better than what we get living in this muck.  I take it that Heaven looks better than high quality video, though.

Or it could be that part of our normal vision that we concentrate on means the perimeter is not sensed as if it is in focus, and hence our normal vision does not have a widescreen clarity that sharp digital has?

Anyway, all that matters is that some people don't like it.  Yay. 

*  all of the Lord of the Rings movies scored in the 90 percent range.  It was a lonely job, being bored with those films.  

Death of the monocle too?

Astronomer Sir Patrick Moore dead, aged 89

I noticed Moore's name on the cover of some magazine the other day, which surprised me because I assumed he had probably died already.

Anyway, now he has.  We never saw much of him in Australia, as far as I can recall, but his grumpy face was memorable.  (Like Julius Sumner Miller, looking rather stern and easily annoyed seemed to be part of the pop scientist mystique in the 1960's.  These days they have to be all smiley so as to not scare the kids.)

But as the title of this post suggests, Moore's photo at the link shows him wearing a monocle.   Surely he must have been one of the last surviving monocle wearers?  Or is there an Eastern European country where this is still the fashion?

Fun with tablet

 

Update:  these were done using Paper Camera, an Android app which to my mind does this conversion to sketch or painterly image far better than any other app I have seen.  It also does it "in camera" so you can immediately tell what shots look good with it.  I must write about the differences I've found using Android and an iPad soon. 

The problem with practical jokes

What a sad story, how the nurse who was taken in by a prank call from Australian FM radio appears to have committed suicide. 

The Age is still running a column from a day or two ago about whether the radio station should have apologised, and basically suggesting that the answer is "no", as it was only the silly English who were upset.  An online poll suggested most people agreed:

The column did make the observation, which has now been rendered a major, major understatement:

The jokesters, however, know it can go badly wrong. A Kyle Sandilands radio stunt involving a lie detector test and a 14-year-old, who revealed she was a rape victim, was deplored across the nation.

I don't listen to FM Breakfast Radio, and never have really, and the only prank calls I remember from AM radio were ones where a friend or family member was involved in the set up.   These type of calls, I think, have little chance of going wrong.  

But calls that may put the job or reputation of the receiver on the line - isn't it time there were recognized as always immature and inherently cruel?  

Time to grow up, FM Radio.

And as for the radio hosts who made the call:  they shouldn't appear on air, anywhere, again.  They're not going to starve to death, I'm sure.  It's the least they or the radio industry can do to show remorse.

Gopnick on Lincoln

The high cost of Abraham Lincoln’s uncompromised morality. : The New Yorker

Always a fine writer, Adam Gopnick here looks at Lincoln.  I haven't read it properly yet, but I'm sure it's worth reading...

Sounds like a solar power "win" to me

Solar power keeps electricity peak down | National - Rural | BigPond News

Record temperatures across Queensland have helped show solar power units on private homes are keeping peak electricity demand down in rural areas of the state, a utility says.

Ergon Energy, which supplies regional areas of the state outside Brisbane and the south east corner, says the most noticeable impact is on the mid-afternoon peak loads.

Temperatures on Tuesday soared to 40 degrees across much of Queensland, with new records for December were set in the southeast, and while they dropped slightly on Wednesday, temperatures were still above the monthly average.

With solar power units in regional areas capable of generating around 173 megawatts (MW), Ergon says as much as 150mw is flowing back into the system from private homes.

Chief executive Ian McLeod says peak demand of 1957 MW during the heatwave was down by 14 per cent on the record peak of 2285 MW in January 2010.

'After a number of mild summers this heatwave has been the first real test of where peak demand is heading on those few hot days of the year,' Mr McLeod said in a statement.

'The record growth of the last decade may be behind us.

'A reduced peak demand reduces the need for more investment in new substations or increasing the capacity of existing substations and powerlines and this takes the pressure off rising power prices.'

Carbon pricing needed everywhere

U.S. energy revolution transforms climate debate - CNN.com

This article by Dieter Helm from Oxford makes the point that the technological advances in the US which have provided it with heaps of  (gas) energy resources has really changed expectations as to how to deal with encouraging a move off fossil fuels.  But at least gas is less harmful than coal, as a stepping stone.

Still comes down to this:

The next steps are harder: A carbon price is a necessary condition for facing up to the pollution our consumption is causing. If we don't want to pay the price of our pollution, then we don't want to tackle climate change. So far, the sad reality is that we are not prepared to act. That is why nothing much has been achieved on the carbon front since 1990.

Why then might the U.S. consider putting a price on its carbon emissions, through taxing pollution? One powerful reason has nothing to do with climate change: It needs the money. Taxing carbon might be politically painful, but not as painful as taxing income. So for the wrong reason there are some grounds for optimism.

What would be even better is if some of the money were spent on new technologies. Current renewables can't bridge the carbon gap. Low-density intermittent energy just doesn't generate enough electricity to carry though decarbonisation. But future renewables just might, and here is not only the best hope on the climate front, but also precisely where the U.S. stars. Its deep technological base and its entrepreneurial culture provide one of the best places to drive through the necessary advances.

For the rest of the world, the lessons are much the same. Everyone needs to switch out of coal, and gas provides a now much more abundant alternative whilst we develop new technologies. Sadly Europe is engaged in a dash from nuclear and gas towards coal.

It needs to waste less money on current expensive renewables -- especially the really expensive options like offshore wind -- and get serious about future renewables. Next generation solar technology is an obvious candidate. And everyone needs to put a carbon price in place.

The climate change problem can be cracked, but not through current policies. And in the meantime the world needs to get used to the idea that the U.S. no longer needs the Middle East to keep its cars and industries moving.

Back to climate change

I've given readers a bit of a  break from climate change posts, but this item from a couple of weeks ago is important.

Real Climate noted some new research indicating the (possibly) very strong regional differences in a warming world.   It's all to do with how atmospheric flow changes.  Here's a couple of key paragraphs:

I think there were some surprising aspects in Deser et al.‘s results. Not that I didn’t expect natural multi-annual variations to be important (on shorter time scales, they are very pronounced), but what strikes me is the strong contrast (on a 50-year time scale) between the global mean temperature (lower graph), which was not very sensitive to the regional atmospheric circulation, and the regional temperatures which were strongly influenced.

It has long been recognized that local and regional climate would warm at different rates than the global mean, but not with such large differences as presented by Deser et al. at the time scales of 50 years and for continental scales. Their results imply that while some regions could experience almost zero warming over 50 years, this will be compensated by substantially stronger in other regions (because they also find that the global mean temperatures to be largely insensitive to the different model initial conditions).

These results also imply a surprisingly long persistence of weather regimes in different parts of the world. Usually, one tends to associate these with inter-annual to decadal scales. However, Deser et al observe:

Such intrinsic climate fluctuations occur not only on interannual-to-decadal timescales but also over periods as long as 50 years… even trends over 50 years are subject to considerable uncertainty owing to natural variability.

These findings were in particular important for the winter season at mid-to-high latitudes. Hence, they could be entirely attributed to chaotic dynamics. On the other hand, the two simulations that they highlighted in their study represented extreme cases, and most of the simulations suggested that the future outcome may be somewhere in between.

My interpretation of Deser et al.‘s results is that the range of possible future temperatures gets broader at the same time as the most likely outcome follows a warming curve. This means that the most likely scenario is warming for the future while there still is a small possibility that the temperature for a particular location hardly changes (or even cools) over a 50-year period.

What strikes me as important about this is it surely means that those economists or advocates who argue for money to be spent more on adaptation to climate change rather than limiting emissions are barking up the wrong tree.

It has long been acknowledged that regional effects of climate change are harder to predict that the bigger picture - this research seems to go further in demonstrating this.   So if you are a politician, how can you reliably predict what adaptation projects are most appropriate to your particular region?

Not a novel story - but a somewhat worrying one

It was only in August that I noted a report that Israeli researchers had found long term decline in human sperm count and quality:

Over the last 10 to 15 years, the concentration of sperm samples collected by the bank dropped 37% from 106 million cells per milliliter to 67 million, according to Dr. Ronit Haimov-Kochman, a leading Israeli infertility researcher at the Hadassah Hebrew University Medical Center.

Now a very similar sounding study in France finds much the same:

New research shows that the concentration of sperm in men's semen has been in steady decline between 1989 and 2005 in France. In addition, there has been a decrease in the number of normally formed sperm.

The study is important because, with over 26,600 men involved, it is probably the largest studied sample in the world and although the results cannot be extrapolated to other countries, it does support other studies from elsewhere that show similar drops in semen concentration and quality in recent years.

They found that over the 17-year period there was a significant and continuous 32.2% decrease in semen concentration (millions of spermatozoa per millilitre of semen), at a rate of about 1.9% per year. The researchers calculated that in men of the average age of 35, semen concentrations declined from an average of 73.6 million/ml in 1989 to 49.9 million/ml in 2005.

In addition, there was a significant 33.4% decrease in the percentage of normally formed sperm over the same period. Changes in the way sperm shape (morphology) was measured during this time may partly explain this decrease and make it difficult to give an estimate for the general population. However, the researchers say that these changes do not account for the total decrease in the quality of sperm morphology observed over the study period.

In their paper, the researchers write: "To our knowledge, it is the first study concluding a severe and general decrease in sperm concentration and morphology at the scale of a whole country over a substantial period. This constitutes a serious public health warning. The link with the environment particularly needs to be determined."

 A few observations:

a.   the Israeli's decline seems to have started from a much higher starting point.  I wonder what the explanation for that might be.

b.  the Israeli report at my first link noted that 20 million per ml and below count as "abnormal" sperm counts, and the French figures indicate that the average is heading that way very rapidly.

c.  As noted at the end of the French report - surely it's most likely that it is something environmental that is causing this, and the figures do sound as if it is something deserving really serious and urgent research.

This deserves greater attention in the media, I reckon.

UPDATE:  the Guardian has a good article looking at this study, and noting the history of controversy over whether declining sperm counts are "real" or just an artefact of changing  laboratory methods.

Certainly, it seems to my amateur scientist eye that the French study goes a long way towards showing that it is real.  The Guardian article notes that there is no detail of socioeconomic factors that might account for why the men in the study had lower sperm counts (such as if they were more likely to be smokers or drinkers), but as the original article I linked to suggested, the men who end up in fertility clinics are probably more likely not to be from the poorer classes, and to have reasonable health if they have been trying to conceive.  The sample, in other words, may be biased for higher than average sperm counts, not lower.